Up and Down Wall Street

No Workers' Paradise

The drop in the unemployment rate belies a weak jobs market.

Rarely has the cliché rung as true as with the latest report that showed the nation's jobless rate fell 0.1 of a percentage point last month, to 7.6%—even though fewer people had jobs and more were unemployed. The improvement, if you can call it that, was the result of nearly half a million folks dropping out of the labor force and the smallest percentage of the working-age population...